When I was a kid in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Jim and I used to be given a nickel most every summer day. We could then walk down to the corner, to the little brick store, and buy a popsicle or, better yet, a Fudgsicle. Oh, Heavenly. I used to make lip prints on the frost. I thought my lips must look just like a movie star's, except without lipstick. (Church of God girls didn't wear lipstick.)
Anyway, now and then I longed to buy something else than a sweet treat. The problem with that was that there were not many choices at our little corner store of good things you could buy for a nickel. If you saved your nickels for a few days, you could buy a box of Crackerjacks, or maybe a kite . Of course there would always be a little trinket inside the box of Crackerjacks. Once I had a little tiny paper umbrella in there. It had a tiny sticker on the underside which said (in very tiny letters) "Made in Japan." I thought everything made in Japan was necessarily 1) really, really little; and 2) really, really cheap.
I continued to believe that for more than a decade, until I moved to Los Angeles and began to work. At first I worked in an American company, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, in the merchandising department of the huge plant located on Central Avenue in Los Angeles. I worked in the office that kept track of all the rubber fuel cells being built for airplanes. In the office I typed large statistical reports on a manual typewriter... (Okay, Grandkids, you probably don't even know what that is. It's a typewriter that is not run by battery or electricity. It has no screen or monitor. It has no Return or Enter key. You roll your paper into it and type. When you get to the end of the line, you reach up with your left hand and "return the carriage" by smacking a metal "handle" to the right and the paper ends up in the center of the machine in the proper position to type the next line. Returning the carriage also makes the paper scroll up one line...) I was a "Clerk Typist" along with maybe fifteen other Clerk Typists in the room.
The Secretary's desk was a few feet away from mine. She typed on an Electric Typewriter. Wow! I think I had seen only one Electric Typewriter before that time.
I had to produce reports every day that had to be duplicated for a lot of people to see. The whole huge company that covered a large number of square blocks had only one copier that I knew of. It was way, way down a long hall from my (Merchandising) office. If you had to have something copied on a copier, (meaning it had to be very readable, in black and white, and even images like the company letterhead had to show), you could take it way down the hall and get it copied by the official copy department. That was quite a process, too. You had to sign in and make note of the number of copies you needed. You had to put your supervisor's initials and yours. They wanted to make sure no one misused the privilege of getting copies from the copier. A person was there who made the copies for you.
Needless to say most of the copies were made in the Merchandising Department by Hectograph, the purple letters on white paper... Well, never mind. Us older people who went to school in the '50's and '60's may remember a lot of school work was done with hectograph. My reports were on hectograph and the bathroom for the clerks had jars of pale purple cream at the sinks. It was the only thing that would take that purple stain off your fingers. A special master was used which, after typing the page, you could attach to a machine that "pressed" the purple characters onto paper to make a copy. You just turned the handle as many times as the number of copies you needed. Nifty, huh?
Those were the times when Made In America was a mark of excellence. In America we made big mechanical inventions like typewriters that were skillfully wielded to produce the paperwork that planned, tracked, and sold thousands of items, including rubber fuel cells in my case. And those rubber fuel cells were the best in the world in those days.
It never occurred to me that the Japanese would make anything more than a tiny paper umbrella, a useless item that could be brought all the way across the ocean and still sell for only a nickel.
I quit Goodyear when Dave and I moved to Texas at the end of 1964. Fast forward to 1966 when we lived in the Los Angeles area again. I got a job in a much more modern office where everyone, including me, had electric typewriters. Wow! That company was American Honda Motor Company. I was the first Secretary in the Automobile Department. In those days Honda automobiles were not imported to the United States. The only Honda products coming to America were motorcycles and generators. My job was to address form letters to American sailors who had bought a tiny Honda automobile (chain driven) while stationed in Japan, and wanted to bring it to the U.S. The letter advised them not to do so, as there would be no service available for those little cars.
"Still tiny," I thought. "But they've come way up from tiny umbrellas..." That was 1966.
Fast forward quite a number of years, and I have brought Mama, in her eighties, to live with me in Spring Valley, near San Diego. It is a bit difficult for her to get in and out of the Volvo I was driving at the time, so I bought a 1997 Honda van, a very popular (and roomy) car, reliable, exquisitely put together mechanically, the best car I have ever owned.
I have come a long way in my thinking about the Japanese. I'm not sure how good or useful those tiny umbrellas were when I was trying to decide between one of them and a delicious Fudgsicle on a sweltering day. But when it comes to Honda vehicles, I can say without hesitation, "They are good cars."
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